If you want to see one man's hell bent on getting computers, knowledge, experience and love of people, please go see Ken Starks. You'll see what he has been able to accomplish for the lower income and class of peope in the Austin Texas and surrounding areas.
He continues to amaze me with tenacity, broken limbs, health limitations and just about a heart of gold what one man can do with help from others to bring change to his community and to help his kids out with working machines.
There is a variety of posts, some political, some not and what he continually does on a very limited budget of personal donations to him of dollars and hardware and how he makes his non-profit linux can do with so little.
There is a former Free Geek non profit (www.freegeek.org) from Portland and EmpowerThy (http://www.upgradeyourcommunity.org) in Vancouver Washington that has a similar feel to Ken's zeal here in Vancouver. Executive Director from Both programs is Oso Martin. If you are from the Portland Metropolitan area, please check out both of these wonderful non-profits that are helping their communities with education, social action and many other wonderful community aspects.
Or may you have the shear tenacity to start a program of your own. Be sure to never over extend yourself or allow your location to become the local trash dump for electronics. Follow all of your local state, city and regional laws, seek area people who may have done this before to avoid making big mistakes and face BIG fines.
Basically what I am saying is find a local or regional leader (also known as a mentor and there are many different models to doing this type of work, so no one way is the right way unless you create a huge dump!) who has done this before, get involved in their operations, talk to them and find out what pitfalls they faced in starting up and learn from them.
